332 HISTORY OF GREECE. their negative argument, so as to show that the battles described in the Iliad could not possibly have taken place if the city of Priam had stood on the hill inhabited by the Ilieans. But the legendary faith subsisted before, and continued -without abate- ment afterwards, notwithstanding such topographical impossibili- ties. Hellanikus, Herodotus, Mindarus, the guides of Xerxes, and Alexander, had not been shocked by them : the case of the latter is the strongest of all, because he had received the best education of his time under Aristotle he was a passionate ad- mirer and constant reader of the Iliad he was moreover per- sonally familiar with the movements of armies, and lived at a time when maps, which began with Anaximander, the disciple of Thales, were at least known to all who sought instruction. Now if, notwithstanding such advantages, Alexander fully believed in the identity of Ilium, unconscious of these many and glaring to- pographical difficulties, much less would Homer himself, or the Homeric auditors, be likely to pay attention to them, at a period, five centuries earlier, of comparative rudeness and ignorance, when prose records as well as geographical maps were totally unknown. 1 The inspired poet might describe, and his hearers Homeric Troy to be four miles farther off from the sea, he aggravated the difficulty of rolling the Trojan horse into the town : it was already sufficiently hard to propel this vast wooden animal full of heroes from the Greek Nau- stathmon to the town of Ilium. The Trojan horse, with its accompaniments Sinon and Laocoon, is one of the capital and indispensable events in the epic : Homer, Arktinus. Les- ches, Virgil, and Quintus Smyrnjeus, all dwell upon it emphatically as the proximate cause of the capture. The difficulties and inconsistencies of the movements ascribed to Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad, when applied to real topography, are well set forth in Spohn, De Agro Trojano, Leipsic, 1814; and Mr. Maclaren has shown (Dissertation on the Topography of the Trojan War, Edinburgh, 1822) that these difficulties are nowise obviated by removing Ilium a few miles further from the sea. 1 Major Kennell argues differently from the visit of Alexander, employ- ing it to confute the hypothesis of Chevalier, who had placed the Homeric Troy at Bounarbashi, the site supposed to have been indicated by Deme- trius and Strabo : " Alexander is said to have been a passionate admirer of the Iliad, and he had an opportunity of deciding on the spot how far the topography was consistent with the narrative. Had h been shown the site of Bounarbashi
